Chip cards having a storage component illustratively in the form of a microchip or a magnetic strip are widely known. They are used for many purposes, for instance as telephone cards, health insurance cards, check cards, credit cards, user identification or the like. The chip cards are issued to the user by the particular issuer of the data stored on the card, that is the post office, a health insurance, a credit institution or the like.
A read and/or write apparatus is required to read the data stored on the chip card or to write data into the chip card, and as a rule said apparatus is stationary, for instance in a cardphone or in an automatic teller.
Accordingly a card user can access the chip card data for purposes of reading and/or writing only at the locally fixed apparatus. Moreover such locally fixed read and/or write apparatus are costly and cumbersome. As a result the applicability of chip cards is restricted.
Apparatus with which to individually mark passes and the like in electronic manner is known from the German patent document 40 18 772 A1 and comprises a housing receiving a power supply and a write device to write data formed by a short code onto the chip card. A slot to insert a chip card into the housing and into the zone of the write device is present at one of the n arrow sides of the housing. The apparatus comprises an operating device in the form of a keyboard. The apparatus also is fitted with a line display. This known apparatus is used to feed a short code, for instance a PIN (personal identification number), through the keyboard panel and to store it in a read/write memory of a chip card. The known apparatus serving exclusively to write data on a chip card and the line display swerving exclusively to monitor the applied code, reading and displaying of data stored on a chip card is precluded by the known apparatus.
A chip card called a "multifunction card" is known from the European patent document 0 385 290 A1 and comprises a memory allowing storing a predetermined number of different data sets. The chip card comprises several display panels and also a keyboard. Several data sets are stored in the operative known chip card, each data set representing the data stored on a particular credit card. The particular data sets are selected by means of the keyboard and the data represented by the data sets, for instance name of credit card owner, credit card numeral or signature of credit card owner, can be displayed in the display panels. Modifying the data stored on the multifunction card is both undesired and precluded.